Regifted 2

As mentioned previously, I'm going to polish up a few old posts, wrap them nicely, and hope you don't mind getting them again. Even if you have seen this one before, at least I can be pretty sure it wasn't you that gave it to me in the first place. So here it is:

For a Dancer

Brother and sister

Now that sex 'n' gender have been put firmly, if controversially, on the agenda by the young – in much the same seniors-unsettling way radical politics and recreational drugs were put on the agenda in my younger days – it's not surprising that any thoughtful person might end up wondering: what if I had been born with a different biological sex? What differences would that have made?

It's a thought experiment that was carried out as long ago as 1928 by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own, in which she traces the projected life story of a sister to William Shakespeare: "She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school". Spoiler alert: it doesn't end well. Indeed, Woolf was quite a pioneer with respect to gender fluidity: in her novel Orlando the protagonist lives several lives over several centuries, and changes sex along the way. So these ideas have been around for a long while, if not forever – see, for example, the Greek myth of Tiresias – but have only really become prominent in the popular imagination in recent times. Well, as the Preacher says in Ecclesiastes, 

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.

Or, in the strangely eloquent LOLcat Bible version:

Has happen? Gunna be agin. Nuthing new undur teh sunz. Kitteh can not sez "OMFGZ sumthing new!" is jus REPOST!

Now, any single life is made up of an impossibly complex series of circumstances and choices, that only ever look inevitable and linear in retrospect. In the statistician's view we all get levelled out into typical examples of this or that category but, regarded as individuals, we're pretty much all crazy outliers in one respect or another. True, to be born a boy in England in 1954 is to have certain broad characteristics in common with a cohort of hundreds of thousands of others, including, of course, all those born as girls in England in 1954. For a start, as I like to say in my autobiographical profile, none of us could ever have known the Land Before Rock'n'Roll, which distinguishes us from premier cru boomers, those born during or immediately after WW2.

But the standard differentiating factors start to pile in immediately after birth, of which sex is just one. These are obvious things like geographical location, social class, race, family stability, siblings, health, psychology, intelligence, schooling, height, appearance, and so on. There are, I am certain, many other men alive today who were born as white males in 1954 in English New Towns to aspirational working class families with one elder sibling, of robust health and good intelligence, and with the good fortune to attend excellent state schools; some of them will even have been short in stature, left-handed, and so on. But not one of them, at least as far as I am aware, has ended up as a clone of me. A thousand other circumstances and choices, some quite possibly unique, have made us into entirely different people. Like Tigger, the wonderful thing is that each of us is the only one!

So, to imagine the consequences of changing just one of those factors is as absurd as it is fun to think about. I mean, what if I had grown as tall as my policeman uncle? It could have happened, but didn't. What if I had shown considerably less interest in homework, and left school at 15? Quite a likely outcome. What if, rather than a loving sister eight years older, I had had a bullying brother who enjoyed tormenting our family's annoying little show-off? A deforming experience, I'm sure. Or what if my innate contrarian tendencies had developed into criminality? Or what about any of the above in combination? You can imagine any number of outcomes, none of which need necessarily have come to fruition in real life, due to some other balancing or distorting factor. Rather than Big Mick, the gangland mastermind, at one extreme, I might just as easily have become Old Wotsisname, the forgettable and dim delivery driver, at the other. Life is not so much a lottery, as a particularly complicated multi-dimensional board-game, played with several chiliagonal dice and several sets of truly life-changing chance cards.

But I suppose sex 'n' gender is the fashionable variable to play around with, so why not? I can imagine writing an entire alternative-reality "Shakespeare's Sister" autobiographical account of my life as a woman. Goodness knows, I was a heartbreaker when I was young... For now, though, I'm just going to consider a few factors that I think would have been in play in the early years.

I think my parents' "policing" of gender would have been conventional, but not oppressive. In the 1950s, ideas of what was appropriate for girls and women were beginning to change, but not yet radically. My parents were liberal in their views but relatively uneducated: both had left school by age 14 and spent their formative years either at work or under military discipline. My mother had, in fact, been a sergeant in the ATS during the war in charge of an anti-aircraft battery, and was out at work from the time I started at school. She was clearly uncomfortable in the role of "housewife", which was never a problem for my easy-going father. From memory and from the photographic evidence, my sister was allowed to be "tomboyish", often wore trousers, and had her hair cut quite short. Indeed, I can remember my parents scoffing at the doll-like get-ups forced on a cousin, and her parents' fussing about getting dirt on her clothes. So, there would have been no major complaints about gender stereotyping, although my toys and games would surely have been different: no guns, no Dinky cars, no "army games" in the woods. Instead, I expect skipping ropes, chalking on pavements, giggling in corner confabs, and ceremonially burying dead birds [1] would have figured large.

Actually, though, I think my main recreation would have been reading. Whatever gene it was that made me into a "reading boy" would surely have been amplified to eleven as a girl. Those were the golden years of the public library service, and I would have been a familiar face at the issue desk, clutching this week's fresh batch of loans, quickly working my way up from Enid Blyton to Jane Austen. "She's always got her head in a book!" Nobody would have had to worry about what to get me for birthdays or Christmas: no dolls or dresses, just book tokens, please! And what do you want to be when you grow up, Michele? A writer, Miss!

After the co-educational, comprehensive days of primary school, the transition to secondary school would have marked a first, definitive fork in the road. A while ago, I was pleasantly surprised to be contacted by someone who had been in my primary school class, and whom I literally hadn't seen or heard from since 1965. Jean, it transpired, is now an academic, fully equipped with a PhD, publications, and everything, and works at a Russell Group university. I wondered which of our town's three grammar schools she had been to – two single-sex, one mixed – and what mutual friends we might have had. But I was amazed to discover that she had in fact gone to a "secondary modern" school.

In our county of Hertfordshire in 1965 state secondary schools were still divided into grammars for the "academic" minority, in those days about 25%, and secondary moderns for the rest. However, your destination was no longer determined by the notorious Eleven Plus exam, but by headteacher's recommendation alone. So you might well suspect some gender bias was at work here, and this would also go some way towards explaining why, despite living in a relatively small town with limited social opportunities, I (that is, the male me) never once met any of the brighter girls from my primary class in our teenage years [2]. However, let's assume that a girl with a high-swottage readiness for three hours of homework a night would have been a grammar-school no-brainer, so to speak. Therefore there was an important choice to be made: the all-girls grammar school, or the mixed-sex grammar school? A tough one, but – on the grounds that at age ten I probably despised boys and that my older sister had already been to the girls' grammar – I think I would have chosen to go to the girls-only school and regretted it for the next seven years.

Doubtless, the long leash that I was allowed in my teenage years as a boy would have been shortened considerably. There would have been bitter quarrels over clothes – "You're not leaving this house looking like that!" – what time to be home, unsuitable boyfriends, makeup, and so on and on and on. Although how far a lively social life would have been a priority for an academically-able "nice" girl in the late 1960s / early 1970s is an interesting question. Those long hours of homework aside, fear of pregnancy would have been a real party pooper. The routine prescription of contraceptives to teenage girls was still some years off, and an unplanned pregnancy was an emphatic full-stop to any girl's freedom and ambitions; as it happened, by then I had some very close-to-home precedents to learn from. It had never occurred to me until speaking to my old classmate Jean that another reason we boys met so few of the very brightest girls socially may have been that we represented the single most serious threat to their future plans. Certainly, many of those girls seem to have decided to postpone the distraction of romantic involvements until university. So, in those crucial mid-teen years, I think I would have given the actual, male me a very wide berth indeed, and cultivated a small, all-female coterie of BFFs, mocking the other girls for their pathetic obsessions with boys and clothes. [3]

I would have hated my hair. This seems to be standard issue: I have yet to meet the teenage girl who did not hate her own hair. But mine... Reddish-mousy, thick, dry, with an unruly wave, like a hatful of straw. Argh. I imagine when I was a kid my mother would have tugged it into a plait every morning that resembled something left over from a harvest festival. It will have driven her mad when I let it hang loose, long, tangled and knotted, as a teen. Probably even more so than the regular rows over the growing length of my actual scruffy male hair: she was a firm believer in the moral virtue of a proper "do" for a decent woman. I can remember hurtful words like "rats' tails" and "bird's nest" getting thrown about in heated arguments with my older sister. As for the rest of my body, we'll just pass over that dangerous and volatile territory in silence, except to remark that, hey, my face is up here, matey. 

Music is an interesting one. Things may be different now, in these culturally homogenised, pick 'n' mix days, but boys and girls used to live their young lives to different soundtracks in the 1960s and 70s or, where there was common ground, enjoyed the same sounds in different ways. You only have to watch footage of the audience at a Beatles concert to realise how "gendered" the reaction to music can be. I mean, crikey! WTF? So which one would have been my Beatle at age twelve? Paul? That bimbo? John? He looks mean to me. Ringo? You must be joking... Quiet, intense, skilful George, though: I choose you to haunt my tweenie dreams.

Later – going on the evidence of the record boxes of the young women I knew back then – I'd be listening to Joni Mitchell and Carole King, of course (Tapestry was clearly handed out in class at girls' schools), but probably also other soulful singer-songwriters like Leonard Cohen or James Taylor. Glam-era David Bowie and Roxy Music might have figured (Bryan Ferry seems to have had a powerful effect on girls you would have expected to know better), but very little "rock" as such, and no "prog" at all, unless it was the ubiquitous Pink Floyd. I would have loved folk, though, and become a Liege & Lief evangelist: I probably fancied myself as a Sandy Denny lookalike, taught myself to play guitar, and wrote some embarrassingly earnest songs about doomed love and handsome rogues, which would never be heard outside of my intensely private bedroom.

But mostly there would have been 45rpm singles: a good solid helping of soul and Motown and even disco and the sort of one-hit wonders that brighten and define a summer. Girls are far less nerdish about music than boys – unafraid to like what they like just because it's "uncool" – and above all girls love to dance. Which is what pop is for, isn't it? Not analysing and taxonomising as if it were Holy Writ. I would have loved to dance for sure, in the improvised, solo styles of the time. Yes, you've seen me, swirling like a dervish in a strobe-light in a darkened hall, tranced-out and untouchable, and wondered: is she strange, stoned, or just completely nuts?

Then there is the fraught business of getting to university. Men are often dismissive of the eager-to-please "swottiness" of clever women, always turning in 10,000-word essays when one side of A4 would have done the job and, incredibly, actually having followed the advice to "read around" a subject. But that attitude – that to try too hard to win is somehow cheating – is essentially an aristocratic ploy to ensure the entitled stay entitled: gentlemen versus "players". Or, in this case, gentlemen versus "bluestockings". But look: in 1970 there were, for example, only five women's colleges at Oxford, versus over 30 for men: only 16% of Oxford undergraduates were female. The picture was even worse at Cambridge. So, to gain admission to Oxbridge at the time I sat my A-levels and subsequent entrance exam, a girl would have had to compete not against a large field of lazy, entitled men, but a small subsection of her own most brilliant peers. Set this alongside the fact that in 1970 only 33% of 621,000 students in higher education overall were women [4], and the chances of success were comparatively slim. No wonder the brightest girls had to try so hard; no wonder so many were discouraged from even bothering, especially those from families like mine with no history of higher education. So at this crucial point, my life could have taken various, very different directions. A lot would have depended on the support and encouragement at school and at home, and on the value set in both on women in higher education. [5]

But, let's assume that, against the odds, I made it to university. It would be too big an assumption, I think, to imagine that I would have made it to Oxford or Cambridge with any ease. The most likely outcome, in reality – assuming I had not been firmly discouraged by my teachers from applying in the first place – would have been disappointment, and a held-over place at some respectable alternative venue for literary studies like Nottingham or Sussex, plus a lifelong suspicion of "Oxbridge types" [6]. But a girl can dream, can't she? Whatever the outcome, and as was certainly the case with my male incarnation, I'm sure I would have undergone some major changes when I arrived at university, but for very different reasons.

I would have left my home town as a confused and conflicted young woman: a hippyish earth-mother-in-training draped around a serious scholar like an unflattering Laura Ashley dress, and trailing a patchouli-scented back-story of half-understood encounters and epiphanies. But then I would quickly have discovered radical politics and then feminism, jettisoned the flowing fabrics and joss sticks, and realised with Damascene force that the problem was not me, or my hair, or even my sharp tongue, but men. Men! Obviously the oafish ones who tear your favourite blouse, or bruise your body in terrifying displays of sexual urgency. And obviously the arrogant ones who belittle, ignore, or talk over you in seminars and meetings. Not to mention the tongue-tied and awkward ones who stare at you with a unsettling mix of desire and contempt. But especially the ones who put themselves forward as leading lights of left-radical factions, but expect "the chicks" to do the shopping, the cooking, the housework, the leaflet-distribution, and all the tedious administrative tasks, and yet still to be there for them when they have their regular dark nights of the soul. Oh, and for clumsy, unsatisfying sex, prescription contraception having turned up just in time to make "no" a really petty-bourgeois downer, Mish, yeah?

So the auspicious night when copies of the SCUM Manifesto and The Dialectic of Sex were pressed into my hands by a new, better-informed friend was the point at which another crucial divergence in this alternative life as a woman began. But that is another story, and I fear that, as with the tale of Shakespeare's sister, it may not necessarily end well.

1. Why did girls do that? Do they still? I doubt it.

2. Unusually, my primary school was streamed by ability, so you would have expected a fair few of those "A" stream girls to have gone on to grammar school. I have no idea how many did.

3. These things are relative, of course, and not always as "gendered" as we might think. The famous Isle of Wight Festival took place in August 1970, when I was 16, but there was no question of me being allowed to attend by my parents. However, I was astounded (and not a little jealous) to discover recently that a female friend from those days had gone – with a boyfriend! – with the full blessing of her parents. However, they were out-of-town liberals – her father a Communist academic – and an entirely different species to most New Town parents.

4. Figures from Social Trends No. 40. This includes full-time, part-time, under- and postgraduates. Compare with 2,383,970 overall in 2018/19  of which 1,025,107 were male and 1,358,860 female (57%)! So some things have changed in the last 50 years...

5. My partner tells me that at her London girls' grammar, there was a typing pool in the sixth form, to prepare girls for secretarial careers... Not exactly a vote of confidence.

6. As it happens, the same remarkable young woman in note (3) did go up to Oxford at the same time as me. In fact, her father drove me, her, and her future husband – my good friend Dave – all the way there in his van.